


I'm not in love

by Anonymous



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: Denial, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 07:19:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan isn't in love with Jones. He isn't. He doesn't think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm not in love

Shall I compare you to a summer's day? Well, May 12th was annoyingly sunny, obnoxiously noisy and unbearably hot. That'll do.

I never liked trite, overwrought sentimentality in poetry; I preferred poets who mocked love and wrote bitter poems full of bile and cynicism. It's a shocker, isn't it? I didn't believe in love, or at least not the kind that got written about and was forced down our collective throats by films and fairy tales and vindictive English teachers. I still don't. This thing with Jones... whatever it is, it's not love. There's no mention of rimming or vigorous bumming in Shakespeare's sonnets that I can recall. Though, some people think he wrote them for a man, so who knows?

I don't love him, I'm almost certain of it. It's a physical thing. Not just the sex mind, though that is incredible, it's just that even walking into a room that he's in is a fucking release. He radiates endorphins and makes me forget about my bastarding life for a while. He doesn't seem to have the same effect on Claire, she can barely stand him. Good thing too, I'm a jealous bastard and I don't fucking share. Sister, shmister.

He's very touchy, that was one of the first things I noticed about him. That and the fact that he's constantly moving to some inaudible beat, nodding and tapping his feet and fidgeting. He touches you all the time when he's talking to you. He'll just reach out and touch your arm, midsentence, like he was confirming that you were really there or something. It's exactly the kind of thing that would drive me mad if it was someone else, but for whatever reason, it makes me feel calmer when he does it.

I don't love him. I don't love his eyes, or his smile, or the way every day is the best day of his fucking life. I don't love him, but I do need him. I'm not proud of this, but I can't deny it either. He's about the only thing that's keeping me together.

"Kiss me," he said, dark eyed with lust, the third week I'd been living with him. "You've been watching me with that look in your eye for the past hour. If you don't kiss me, I'm kissing you."

I stopped his mouth by pressing my lips roughly to his. After all those constant little touches to my face and arms and waist, all those feather light kisses on the cheek and in the corner of my mouth, it felt good to finally do something to him first, even if he'd had to ask me to first.

We didn't have sex that night, but we did sleep together in his bed (it would soon become our bed and now it's Claire's bed) for the first time. In a way, that was more intimate than sex would have been, more vulnerable. We lay side by side and kissed like teenagers for hours. Finally, he pulled me close, rested my head on his chest and held me. It was something I would laugh at if I saw it in a film or read in a novel, and I'd dismiss it as the most appalling Hallmark muck, but with his arms around me and his heart thudding in my ear I felt as close to happy as I had been in a long time.

After that there was no going back. I wish I didn't need Jones to feel like some approximation of a human being, but I do. 

But I don't love him. I don't think.


End file.
